4/30/08: Phil Lester from Victoria University of Wellington is visiting the lab, giving a seminar, and checking out some of our sites (and ants) in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
  
4/25/08: Nate is in Boulder for Jane Zelikova's PhD seminar and to collaborate with Christy McCain on a couple of projects.
4/21/08: Greg is off to Bodega Bay to initiate a couple of new projects with Jay Stachowicz and Sharon Strauss.
4/14/08: Jon Chase is visiting the lab this week and giving a departmental seminar.
3/29/08: Ever wonder about the effects of climatic change on Banksia in Western Australia? If so, check out this new paper by Fitzpatrick et al. in Global Change Biology.
3/26/08: BIG NEWS: JP Lessard was just awarded an NSERC fellowship, and Greg Crutsinger just received an NSF DDIG!
3/25/08: Brian Inouye and Nora Underwood from Florida State are visiting the lab this Thursday and Friday.
2/25/08: It's official: Matt Fitzpatrick is now Dr. Matthew C. Fitzpatrick, PhD. Sooner than any of us want, he's off to Harvard Forest to begin a postdoc.
2/4/08: Greg is in the south of France giving a talk on community genetics. He's also drinking lots of wine and eating lots of bread and cheese.
1/31/08: Matt Fitzpatrick is gearing up to defend his PhD and start a postdoc based at Harvard Forest.
1/14/08: Happy new year! We've been slow to post, because of the addition of the newest lab member over the Holidays: Finn Marshall Sanders was born on December 17.
12/11/07: It's the end of the fall semester, and a new paper by Crutsinger, superstar undergrad alum Mellisa Habenicht, Classen, Schweitzer and Sanders was just published in Plant and Soil.
12/3/07: A new paper by Nicole Heller, Jessica Shors, Deborah Gordon, and Nate on the invasion dynamics of the Argentine ant just came out in Oecologia.
11/22/07: Just in time for Thanksgiving, a new paper in Oikos by Crutsinger, Collins, Fordyce, and Sanders on the temporal dynamics of the arthropod community associated with Solidago.
11/16/07: Greg is up at Eastern Kentucky University giving a seminar.
11/13/07: Lara, Windy, Greg led John Wiens from the Nature Conservancy around the field sites at Freel's Bend.
11/6/07: Nick Haddad from NC State is visiting the lab and giving a departmental seminar.
11/2/07: Rob Dunn and collaborators are here to begin setting up the warming experiment at Duke Forest and Harvard Forest.
10/31/07: Just in time for Halloween, check out the new paper on genotypes and genotypic diversity as barriers to plant invasions by Crutsinger, Souza, and Sanders in Ecology Letters.
10/2/07: Tara is off to Coweeta to sample top predators in leaf litter communities, then to Harvard Forest to begin a litter transplant experiment.
9/26/07: Greg is at the University of Zurich giving a talk, and Nate is at GBIF in Copenhagen at a workshop on diversity in montane regions.
9/18/07: JP and his devoted field crew have just finished harvesting a 3-month long experiment looking at the interactive effects of temperature and food addition on leaf-litter ant (and arthropod) community structure along the environmental gradient in the Smokies. Now the ID'ing begins...
9/17/07: Nate is just back from beautiful Boulder, where he visited Jane Zelikova and her committee. Matt's just back from a trip to Australia where he worked on several collaborative projects.
9/15/07: Check out this new paper in Ecology by Sanders, Weltzin, Crutsinger, Nuñez, Fitzpatrick, Oswalt, and Lane. The paper shows, using a manipulative experiment, how multiple factors can interact to shape invasions.
8/26/07: After 29 nights in the tents, 250 miles of hiking, 4 bee stings, and about 200 Clif bars...Windy Bunn (with the help of undergrad superstar Claire Brown) has finished her field work in the Smokies!
8/05/07: Kerri Crawford's paper with Greg and Nate appears in this month's issue of Ecology. Click here to check it out. And there's a nice paper in the same issue testing whether the metabolic theory of ecology can account for broad-scale variation in species richness. There are several responses to the paper that are also worth reading.
8/04/07: Windy and Lara are off to present at ESA in beautiful San Jose.
6/20/07: More big news from Canada (Quebec really): JP Lessard was just awarded a prestigious 3-yr FQRNT fellowship to support his PhD research.
And Tara Sackett will be joining the lab as a postdoc for two years, also supported a FQRNT fellowship.
Thanks, Canada!
5/27/07: Greg is visiting David Wardle's group in Sweden until October.
5/26/07: Here's a new paper by Dunn, Parker and Sanders on temporal partitioning in ant communities.
5/17/07: Check out the new paper on assembly rules in ant commmunities by Sanders, Gotelli, Wittman, Ratchford, Ellison, and Jules in the Journal of Biogeography.
5/9/07: Nate is in Copenhagen for an Ecography meeting and to meet with Carsten Rahbek's group at the University of Copenhagen.
5/7/07: It's end of the semester at UT and the beginning of the field season.
Greg is preparing (or should be) to go to Sweden to work with David Wardle,
JP is busy setting up experiments in the Smokies looking at how temperature interacts with resources to shape ant communities,
Matt is starting a new project looking the interactions between climate change and invasive ant species on native ant biodiversity,
Windy is working with folks in the Park and Jason Fridley to choose her veg plots to resample this summer,
Maggie is preparing to go to Monteverde to work on ants in treefall gaps
and Lara is finishing up some experiments on the controls on Lespedeza demography and analyzing some really neat data on the relationships between native and non-native biodiversity.
4/30/07: Greg is off to India to participate in the Smithsonian Institution's "Tools for Conserving Biodiversity" course at the Wildlife Institute of India and Rajaji National Park in Dehradun.
4/20/07: David Wardle and Steve Hubbell are visiting the lab this week. Should be fun.
4/16/07: Matt Fitzpatrick just won perhaps the most prestigious award a UT grad student can win - the Yates Fellowship.
4/10/07: Maggie Patrick was just awarded a McClure Fellowship to support her work in Costa Rica this summer!
4/7/07: Check out the new paper on ant diversity gradients and spatial grain by Sanders, Lessard, Fitzpatrick, and Dunn.
3/29/07: Check out the new paper on reproductive phenologies in ants by Dunn, Parker, Geraghty, and Sanders.
3/23/07: Big news: JP was just awarded a highly competitive NSERC fellowship from Canada!
3/03/07: Check out the new paper by Palladini, Jones, Sanders and Jules on the recovery of forest ant communities in the Siskiyous.
3/02/07: Rob Dunn (former postdoc now at NC State), Matt, and Nate just found out that the DOE/NICCR program will fund their work on modelling the effects of projected climatic change on ant biodiversity.
2/20/07: Matt is off to Switzerland for a meeting about range expansions and biological invasions. Greg is in California at the Plant-Herbivore Gordon Conference.
1/30/07: Two of Jessica Hellmann's students from Notre Dame are coming down for a visit this week. Should be a big time.
12/14/06: It's finals week at UT. But there's even more exciting news than that: Kerri Crawford's Honors Thesis was just accepted for publication in Ecology!.
12/7/06: JP Lessard is presenting some of his data at the annual All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory meeting this week; Matt Fitzpatrick just learned that he's been awarded a travel grant to go to the International Biogeography Society meetings in the Canary Islands in January.
11/3/06: Greg Crutsinger passed his comprehensive exams today. He's now a PhD candidate! Congratulations, Greg.
10/7/06: Almost the entire lab is off to the Southern Appalachian Arthropod Biology Conference at the beautiful Highlands Biological Station.
10/6/06: Sharon Strauss from UC Davis is visiting the department. Hopefully she'll be able to straighten out Greg's PhD project.
9/18/06: Os Schmitz from Yale is visiting the lab this week.
9/15/06: Lara Souza and Windy Bunn have finished harvesting all of the biomass samples from their Herculean field project on landscape-level controls on plant invasions and community structure, and Greg Crutsinger just completed a biomass harvest for the genotypic diversity project. Now comes the drying and weighing...
8/29/06: Matt Fitzpatrick's important paper on the distribution of fire ants, and climate modeling more generally, is now available here.
8/21/06: Check out Crutsinger et al. in this week's issue of Science (avavilable for download at our publications page).
8/14/06: Kerri Crawford is off to Rice University where she's going to start a PhD with Jenn Rudgers and Ken Whitney.
8/09/06: Congratulations to Matt and Heather Fitpatrick on the birth of their daughter Gwyneth Anne!
7/30/06: Nate is off to the IUSSI meeting in Washington, DC. Everyone else is busy finishing up their ESA talks and field work.
7/26/06: Kate Parr from CSIRO was here for a few days to develop some potential collaborations.
7/06/06: Congratulations to our own Jason Robinson and his wife Jill on the birth of their son!
6/21/06: 3 new grad students are joining the Sanders lab: Windy Bunn, JP Lessard, and Maggie Patrick.
6/15/06: Nate and Jim Fordyce are enaged in introducing five East Tennessee high school and middle school science teachers in the science of ecology. The dynamic and enthusiastic group is busy working on insect and plant biodiversity projects.